Schedule Shuffling at Fox May Have Just Outed the ‘Avatar 2′ Release Date

Big things are a-happenin’ over at Fox, per The Hollywood Reporter. The studio made a slew of scheduling changes on the night before Thanksgiving as a sort of special edition of a Friday dump. (That term refers to the PR practice of burying bad or otherwise uninteresting news on a Friday afternoon, when coverage will be minimal.) Big-name projects have all been shuffled around, and that’s all fully detailed below, but the most eye-catching item on Fox’s docket happens to be an unnamed project from James Cameron’s production company Lightstorm Entertainment.

While Cameron has made it clear that there definitely will be five (5!) Avatar films, and that audiences will see them, and that they will damn well like it too, the timeline’s been awful fuzzy. Avatar 2was slated for a release in December 2014, then it got bumped to 2015’s holiday season, then pushed once more to Christmastime in 2017. When Star Wars: Episode VIII moved from May to December of 2017, Cameron ditched that date too, evidently hoping to avoid competition. The mystery project from Cameron and Co. now sits at December 21, 2018. Could this be the Avatar sequel that we’ve all been clamoring for? Or rather, that someone somewhere has probably been clamoring for?

Aside from that, lots of other gestating releases have new dates. Alien: Covenant, the fifth installment in the series, has been moved up a few months to May 19 of next year. Fox has placed two unnamed Marvel movies on November 2, 2018 and February 14, 2019, to be culled from their stable of licensed properties that includes the X-Men and Fantastic Four. (Smart money says one of those two mystery movies will be Deadpool 2.) Accordingly, they’ve also moved an unnamed Marvel film off of its original date of October 6, 2017. Finally, the sequel Kingsman: The Golden Circle has been postponed from June 16 of next year to October 6.

Lots to look forward to in the years to come, so long as you’re someone who can get excited over the prospect of a movie’s simple existence with no supplemental information whatsoever!